South Downs & Barcombe Mills
Bo & Jean write:
During our stays at 7B Uncle Peter would often come down at weekends and occassionally took us kids on an outing.
Outings with Uncle Peter had to be educational or health oriented. We sometimes went fossil hunting in clay fields or chalk quarries, always more personal collectors for the man than for ourselves. Once I remember him taking us first to a quarry on the south downs where there were huge locust-sized grasshoppers and then on to a shallow depression in the hillside. Here he, and we dug. He explained that such depressions were campsites of Neolithic man and we might find stone tools. These days this would be seen as vandalism but then was mere amateur archaeology. We found ‘potboilers’ charred flinty cores left over from napping off tools and used to set in the fires until red hot then plunged into water-filled clay pots to cook food. The pots were not fired and so would not stand being held over a fire. I think we might once have found a flint arrowhead and some pottery remains made in such a way as to date it as pre-roman. The best of these treks was a day when we all noticed a cow lying almost on its back bellowing. Peter strode off penknife in hand and stabbed the cow in its exposed abdomen. Even from a distance we could hear gas escape which was the issue ailing the cow. The cow got up and wandered off seemingly unhurt by the savage attack.
On all such outings, often started by bus, we were expected to keep up the brisk pace Peter set. His stride meant Jean hurrying and me almost running along to keep up. We resented and pleaded but it fell on deaf ears. His pace would slow a little but he soon forgot and resumed his lope. One day we took revenge.
Not far from Gran’s house was a loved local spot called Barcombe Mills. There the Sussex Ouse widened and branched and one could hire various pleasure boats. My dad took us there sometimes to fish for eels.
The Ouse at Barcombe Mills
We could walk from Gran’s smallholding to the river without ever walking a paved road. Walking the field hedges made it well under a mile from 7B. This mile we rushed along behind the disappearing back of Uncle Peter as usual along overgrown paths and hedgerows pricked by thistles and stung by nettles. He striding out with the fitness of a mountaineer and the pace of a single man, us running to keep up and sweating in the summer sun. Walks with my uncle were always the precursor to blistered heels or sore shins, ankles barked on tree roots and skin torn by brambles. I have no doubt he liked us well enough but could just not think down to our size. From the bottom of the land we would cross the stream and than walk along by the ditch until meeting an overgrown footpath we could hack our way through, crossing just one proper lane and then on farm tracks right down to the river and then follow the path to the place where a meander had become a tow courses surrounding several eyots. We arrived sweaty and tingling to find Peter ushering us into a canoe. On the meandering river it was safe boating even in the pre-PC sans lifejacket era.
At the Mills the river split and a large pool had formed that was perfect for ‘messing about on the river. Freedom reigned, now that returning soldiers had undermined the tyranny of the class system. England had become everyone’s playground despite poverty and austerity, and the new tyranny of ‘health & safety’ did not yet hold sway. Taking two small children out on a river in a canoe without the benefit of life jackets or swimming ability was considered both normal by the world at large and the height of excitement for us kids. In 1950s Britain we had no computer games or Disneylands, no Alton Towers nor CGI… going to ‘the seaside’, or going to the fair when it pitched up for its annual weekend was the very pinnacle of possible pleasures in the days when the one and only TV channel closed down for dinner and was still presented by men in dinner jackets and ladies in their party frocks.
Peter determined we should learn to canoe like the Swallows and Amazons of the story books.
On this day my uncle decided to teach us how to row a canoe. We stoically withstood the onslaught of ‘one of his lectures’ and then equally stoically began to paddle away, as he pointed out each error of style or judgement while taking full advantage of his two galley slaves. At first we revelled in this new responsibility with tongues clamped between lips in tight concentration. In time it dawned on us that this was another of his country walks… where our tiny strides exhausted us and his jaunt barely exercised his long legs, the only difference being the medium. We paddled like fury while he enjoyed the fruits of our labour.
He set about to teach us and soon we were busily rowing while he shed his shirt in the sun and instructed us as we all forged ahead.
Boating at Barcombe Mills
The sun rose and uncle Peter shed his shirt to try and get his fish-belly white torso to blend a little with his Alpine tanned face and arms. In that far away time my sister and I were as close as best friends and all it took was the most minuscule arching of an eyebrow and an almost undetectable nod of assent for us to set a plan. Somehow, wordlessly, Jean and I communicated a ploy. Innocently we casually steered the canoe toward the bank… all those ‘walks’ at his pace, all the lectures and the ‘look, don’t touch’ conducted tours of his bedroom cabinet exhibits were about to be paid back. Our new expertise at the paddles meant we could aim his bare back perfectly into that one nook on the riverbank where the stinging nettles came right down to the water’s edge. We executed a curve tight to the bank and let the canoe drift lazily into the thick bank of nettles out of our Uncle’s view. Soon his back was as rash ridden as our shins and calves. We triumphed in his squeals of pain. We widened innocent eyes and opened astonished mouths at his admonitions, while cocking a knowing eyebrow esoterically in the unspoken code of children everywhere. Barcombe Mills was burned into my memory just as the nettles burned his bare flesh. Obviously, with our inexperience we could not have deliberately visited such pain upon him!